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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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OCTOBER 2005
How exotics fared
New Orleans Audubon Park Zoo president Ron Forman on October 3 told the World Association of Zoos & Aquariums annual conference in New York that restoring the Audubon facilities would probably cost $60 million.
“A skeleton staff of 12 struggled to feed and get water to 1,400 hungry and thirsty animals with limited emergency provisions,” Oscar Corral of the Miami Herald reported on September 5. The crew worked around “fallen palms, eucalyptus and willow trees blocking the paths,” but “the animals mostly survived and are secure,” Corral assured.
“One of the huge alligators is missing,” Corral noted, “and some birds died,” along with two otters and a raccoon.
The Audubon Aquarium of the Americas fared far worse, Corral added. About a third of the 6,000 resident fish and other marine animals died within a week of Katrina, due to loss of electricity to run the water and air circulation systems. Most of the rest died during the next week, Associated Press writer Daisy Nguyen reported.
Nineteen penguins and two sea otters were rescued and flown to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on September 9.
Of the 10 white alligators belonging to the Audubon Park Zoo and Aquarium of the Americas, only one named Thibodaux is known to have survived––because he was on loan to Jenkinson’s Aquarium in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.
The Houston Zoo and Moody Gardens took in some of the surviving animals from the Aquarium of the Americas, only to find themselves in the path of Hurricane Rita.
“At the Houston Zoo, geese, ducks and chickens roomed together in one of the zoo’s men’s rooms. Turkeys weathered the hurricane in a women’s rest room. Maned wolves and anteaters shacked up with the tenants of the Siberian tiger section,” zoo spokesperson Brian Hill told Hillel Italie of Associated Press.
Moody Gardens “lost 13 fish, an endangered snake known as a Wagler’s viper and a South American bird called a piping guan” to Rita, the Houston Chronicle reported. But “A Katrina refugee, an endangered green sea turtle named King Midas, rode out Rita without incident.”
The Hattiesburg Zoo, closed by Hurricane Katrina, reopened on September 27 with only half as many trees as before and many damaged exhibits––but the only animals lost, zoo director Lori Banchero said, were fish.
The Exotic Cat Refuge in Beaumont, Texas, housing 18 exotic cats, a monkey, two bears, and two wolves, plus about 100 domestic cats displaced by Katrina, was “in shambles” after Rita, reported Ted Oberg of KTRK-TV. Downed trees damaged many cages, the pumps failed, and a ton of stored meat for the big cats spoiled, founder Monique Woodward told Oberg.
“I’m afraid we’re probably going to have to kill them,” said Woodward’s daughter Deb Horner.